The Gospel of Peter is a second-century Christian account of Jesus' trial, death, and resurrection, written in Greek under the apostle Peter's name — though scholars agree Peter did not write it. Only a long fragment survives, discovered in 1886–87 in a monk's grave at Akhmim, Egypt. It is famous as the only ancient gospel that narrates the resurrection itself — complete with two towering angelic figures and a cross that walks out of the tomb and answers a voice from heaven.
Most so-called "lost gospels" are collections of sayings or mystical dialogues. The Gospel of Peter is different: it is a story — a fast-moving passion narrative that overlaps heavily with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then goes where none of them dared, straight inside the sealed tomb at the moment of resurrection. It also carries one of the best-documented rejection stories in early Christianity: we know the name of the bishop who banned it, roughly when, and why.
In the winter of 1886–87, archaeologists of the French Archaeological Mission in Cairo were excavating a cemetery at Akhmim in Upper Egypt — the ancient city of Panopolis. In one grave, traditionally identified as a Christian monk's, they found a small parchment codex buried with the body. Urbain Bouriant published its contents in 1892, and scholars realized the little book was a treasure chest of lost literature.
The codex — copied centuries after the works it contains, probably between the sixth and ninth centuries — held a long Greek fragment of the Gospel of Peter, a portion of the Apocalypse of Peter, and Greek extracts of 1 Enoch, a book that survives complete only in Ethiopia (see our Book of Enoch guide). Someone in late antique Egypt had valued these non-canonical texts enough to be buried with them.
The Gospel of Peter fragment runs about sixty verses, beginning in mid-sentence at the end of Jesus' trial and breaking off in mid-sentence just as a resurrection appearance seems about to begin — the torn-out center of a longer work.
The fragment opens at the close of the trial: none of the Jewish judges will wash their hands — nor does Herod. Then comes the book's most startling feature: it is Herod the king, not Pontius Pilate, who pronounces the sentence and hands Jesus over for execution. Pilate, who washes his hands as in Matthew, simply leaves.
The story then moves quickly through scenes familiar from the canonical passion narratives, retold with new details and a sharper edge:
Joseph, the friend of Pilate, asks for the body — and in a telling detail, Pilate has to request it from Herod, who grants it courteously, addressing Pilate as his brother. Jesus is buried in a tomb called Joseph's Garden. Fearing the disciples will steal the body, the elders ask Pilate for soldiers. A centurion named Petronius seals the tomb with seven seals, pitches a tent, and keeps watch — joined by a crowd from Jerusalem that comes out on the Sabbath just to look at the sealed tomb.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all narrate the discovery of the empty tomb — none describes the resurrection happening. The Gospel of Peter does, and in front of witnesses: the Roman soldiers and the elders watching the tomb.
In the night before the Lord's day, a great voice sounds in the sky. The heavens open and two men descend in blazing light. The stone rolls away from the tomb's entrance by itself, and the two figures go in. Then, as the terrified guards watch, three figures come out: two of them supporting the third, and behind them — a cross, following on its own. The heads of the two reach up to heaven, but the head of the one they lead reaches beyond the heavens. Then a voice from the sky asks, "Have you preached to those who sleep?" — and from the cross comes the answer: yes.
It is one of the strangest, most vivid scenes in early Christian literature: giant luminous figures, a cosmic Christ taller than the sky, and a walking, talking cross affirming that the dead have heard the gospel. The guards rush to Pilate and confess that the crucified man was truly God's Son. Pilate declares himself clean of the blood of the Son of God, and the elders beg him to order the soldiers to say nothing — better, they reason, to be guilty before God than to be stoned by the people.
The fragment then gives a quieter, more familiar scene: at dawn, Mary Magdalene — described as a disciple of the Lord — comes with her friends to mourn, finds the tomb open, and meets a radiant young man who tells her the Lord has risen and gone. The women flee, afraid. And then the text breaks off in the middle of its final sentence, just as Simon Peter — narrating in the first person — his brother Andrew, and Levi the son of Alphaeus take their nets to the sea: apparently the opening of a resurrection appearance by the water, forever unfinished.
The complete surviving text in clear modern English — the passion, the resurrection scene, and the abrupt ending exactly as it survives. Members read free online.
Read the Gospel of Peter →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryIn the four canonical gospels, Pilate is the reluctant executioner: Rome kills Jesus, even if the gospel writers show local leaders pressing for it. The Gospel of Peter rewrites that balance. Herod — presented as the reigning king — gives the order, Jewish participants carry out the mockery and crucifixion, and Pilate is pushed offstage until he returns to declare his innocence.
Scholars read this shift as a window into the second century, when largely Gentile Christian communities living under Roman rule retold the passion in ways that softened Rome's role and hardened the blame on Jewish leadership. Modern historians are frank that this is polemical distortion — crucifixion was a Roman punishment, ordered by a Roman prefect — and they treat the Herod scene as evidence of how the story evolved in the retelling, an early landmark in a tragic trajectory of anti-Jewish narrative that later centuries would amplify.
Two phrases in the fragment set off a debate that has run since 1892. Jesus hangs on the cross silent, as if he felt no pain; and at the moment of death he is not said to die but to be taken up. To some early readers — and some modern ones — this sounds like docetism: the ancient teaching, from a Greek word meaning to seem, that Christ's body and suffering were appearance rather than reality. Docetism was one of the earliest ideas the church rejected as heresy, and it is precisely the charge that got the Gospel of Peter banned in antiquity.
Modern scholarship is more cautious. Read closely, the text also works as straightforward narrative: a hero enduring agony without crying out is a familiar ancient motif of courage, and being taken up can simply be a reverent way of saying he died and was exalted. Many scholars conclude the gospel is not docetic in itself but was capable of a docetic reading — which, in the second century, was enough to make it dangerous. The talking cross likely dramatizes a belief also echoed in 1 Peter: that between his death and resurrection, Christ preached to the dead. In this scene, the cross itself testifies the mission was accomplished.
The Gospel of Peter has something almost no other lost gospel has: a datable, documented account of its rejection, preserved by the church historian Eusebius. Around 190 AD, Serapion, bishop of Antioch, visited the church at Rhossus, where the congregation was quarreling over whether the book could be read in worship. Serapion — who had not read it — took the generous view: if this was all the fuss was about, let it be read.
Then reports reached him that the text was feeding docetic teaching in the community. So Serapion borrowed a copy and actually read it. His verdict, preserved by Eusebius, was nuanced: most of the book accorded with the true teaching about the Savior, but some things had been added — and he listed them. He withdrew his permission and wrote a treatise on the so-called Gospel of Peter, laying down a principle that shaped the canon: the church receives Peter and the other apostles, but writings that falsely circulate under their names it rejects. It is a rare, wonderfully human moment in canon history — a bishop changing his mind because he did the reading.
The honest, history-framed answer: it never came close. Unlike some disputed books that hovered at the edges of the canon for centuries, the Gospel of Peter appears on no ancient canon list at all. The early church weighed candidate books by fairly consistent criteria — was it genuinely apostolic, was it anciently and widely used across the churches, and did it agree with the faith the churches already taught? The Gospel of Peter failed the tests:
By the early fourth century, Eusebius could report that no mainstream church writer had appealed to it, and he classed the gospel circulating under Peter's name among the writings the churches did not receive. There was no conspiracy and no suppression order — the book lost the argument, stopped being copied, and slipped out of circulation until an Egyptian grave gave part of it back. Its afterlife belongs to the wider story of the lost books of the Bible.
Serapion's episode gives a hard ceiling: the Gospel of Peter existed, and was established enough to be fought over, by about 190 AD. Two small papyrus fragments from Oxyrhynchus, copied around 200 AD, may preserve bits of the same work — scholars still dispute the identification — which would confirm it was circulating in Egypt early. Most scholars date its composition to the first half or middle of the second century, perhaps in Syria.
The livelier debate concerns its relationship to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the 1980s, John Dominic Crossan advanced a bold minority thesis: that embedded within the Gospel of Peter is an older source he called the "Cross Gospel," written before the canonical gospels and used by them. Most specialists — Raymond Brown prominent among them — were unpersuaded, arguing instead that the author knew the canonical passion stories, probably from hearing them read aloud, and retold them freely from memory, weaving in popular tradition. Small anachronisms support the later dating: the text calls Sunday the Lord's day, a Christian term from after the apostolic era. The mainstream view: a second-century retelling that depends on the earlier gospels — fascinating precisely because it shows how the story kept growing.
Yes — and it may be the easiest entry point in all the extracanonical literature. The surviving fragment takes perhaps twenty minutes to read, the story is already familiar, and the differences leap off the page. Here is what readers get:
Read it as the historical document it is: not a rival revelation, but a second-century community's telling of the story at the center of its faith — vivid, strange, flawed, and preserved by pure archaeological luck in a monk's grave by the Nile.
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